Medicine deals with the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of diseases.
Medicine has progressed over the years from ancient times to modern day
and a variety of specialties have evolved due to the requirement of
focus on specific sections of population (gender and age based medicine)
or different parts (organs) of the body and the varied effects of their
dysfunction on human health.
What has kept man going has been the
challenges that nature throws at him and his ability to respond to these
challenges through his ingenuity (observation, inference and trial and
error) culminating into the art and science that is medicine.
Given below is a quick timeline of advancement in Medicine as per Infoplease:
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460 BCE
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Birth of Hippocrates, Greek physician and founder of the
first university. Considered the father of medicine. Hippocrates bases
medicine on objective observation and deductive reasoning, although he does
accept the commonly held belief that disease results from an imbalance of the
four bodily humors (an idea that persists for centuries).
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c.130 CE
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Birth of Galen, considered by many to be the most
important contributor to medicine following Hippocrates. Born of Greek
parents, Galen resides primarily in Rome where he is physician to the
gladiators and personal physician to several emperors. He publishes some 500
treatises and is still respected for his contributions to anatomy,
physiology, and pharmacology.
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910
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Persian physician Rhazes is the first to identify
smallpox, as distinguished from measles, and to suggest blood as the cause of
infectious disease.
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1590
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Dutch lens grinder Zacharius Jannssen invents the
microscope
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1628
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William Harvey publishes An Anatomical Study of the Motion
of the Heart and of the Blood in Animals, describing how blood is pumped
throughout the body by the heart, and then returns to the heart and
recirculates. The book is very controversial but becomes the basis for modern
research on the heart and blood vessels.
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1656
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Experimenting on dogs, English architect Sir Christopher
Wren is the first to administer medications intravenously by means of an
animal bladder attached to a sharpened quill. Wren also experiments with
canine blood transfusions (although safe human blood transfusions only became
feasible after Karl Landsteiner develops the ABO blood-typing system in
1900).
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1670
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Anton van Leeuwenhoek refines the microscope and fashions
nearly 500 models. Discovers blood cells and observes animal and plant
tissues and microorganisms.
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1747
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James Lind , a Scottish naval surgeon, discovers that
citrus fruits prevent scurvy. He publishes his Treatise of the Scurvy in
1754, identifying the cure for this common and dangerous disease of sailors,
although it takes another 40 years before an official Admiralty order
dictates the supply of lemon juice to ships.
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1796
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Edward Jenner develops a method to protect people from
smallpox by exposing them to the cowpox virus. In his famous experiment, he
rubs pus from a dairymaid's cowpox postule into scratches on the arm of his
gardener's 8-year-old son, and then exposes him to smallpox six weeks later
(which he does not develop). The process becomes known as vaccination from
the Latin vacca for cow. Vaccination with cowpox is made compulsory in
Britain in 1853. Jenner is sometimes called the founding father of
immunology.
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1800
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Sir Humphry Davy announces the anesthetic properties of
nitrous oxide, although dentists do not begin using the gas as an anesthetic
for almost 45 years.
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1816
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René Laënnec invents the stethoscope.
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1818
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British obstetrician James Blundell performs the first
successful transfusion of human blood.
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1842
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American surgeon Crawford W. Long uses ether as a general
anesthetic during surgery but does not publish his results. Credit goes to
dentist William Morton.
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1844
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Dr. Horace Wells, American dentist, uses nitrous oxide as
an anesthetic.
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1846
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Boston dentist Dr. William Morton demonstrates ether's
anesthetic properties during a tooth extraction.
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1849
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Elizabeth Blackwell is the first woman to receive a
medical degree (from Geneva Medical College in Geneva, New York).
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1867
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Joseph Lister publishes Antiseptic Principle of the
Practice of Surgery, one of the most important developments in medicine.
Lister was convinced of the need for cleanliness in the operating room, a
revolutionary idea at the time. He develops antiseptic surgical methods,
using carbolic acid to clean wounds and surgical instruments. The immediate
success of his methods leads to general adoption. In one hospital that adopts
his methods, deaths from infection decrease from nearly 60% to just 4%.
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1870s
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Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch establish the germ theory of
disease. According to germ theory, a specific disease is caused by a specific
organism. Before this discovery, most doctors believe diseases are caused by
spontaneous generation. In fact, doctors would perform autopsies on people
who died of infectious diseases and then care for living patients without
washing their hands, not realizing that they were therefore transmitting the
disease.
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1879
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First vaccine for cholera
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1881
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First vaccine for anthrax
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1882
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First vaccine for rabies
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1890
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Emil von Behring discovers antitoxins and uses them to
develop tetanus and diphtheria vaccines.
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1895
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German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen discovers X rays.
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1896
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First vaccine for typhoid fever.
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1897
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Ronald Ross, a British officer in the Indian Medical
Service, demonstrates that malaria parasites are transmitted via mosquitoes,
although French army surgeon Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran identified
parasites in the blood of a malaria patient in 1880. The treatment for
malaria was identified much earlier (and is still used today). The Qinghao
plant (Artemisia annua) was described in a Chinese medical treatise from the
2nd century BCE; the active ingredient, known as artemisinin, was isolated by
Chinese scientists in 1971 and is still used today. The more commonly known
treatment, quinine, was derived from the bark of a tree called Peruvian bark
or Cinchona and was introduced to the Spanish by indigenous people in South
America during the 17th century.
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1897
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First vaccine for plague.
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1899
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Felix Hoffman develops aspirin (acetyl salicylic acid).
The juice from willow tree bark had been used as early as 400 BC to relieve
pain. 19th century scientists knew that it was the salicylic acid in the
willow that made it work, but it irritated the lining of the mouth and
stomach. Hoffman synthesizes acetyl salicylic acid, developing what is now
the most widely used medicine in the world.
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1901
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Austrian-American Karl Landsteiner describes blood
compatibility and rejection (i.e., what happens when a person receives a
blood transfusion from another human of either compatible or incompatible
blood type), developing the ABO system of blood typing. This system
classifies the bloods of human beings into A, B, AB, and O groups.
Landsteiner receives the 1930 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for this
discovery.
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1906
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Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins suggests the existence of
vitamins and concludes they are essential to health. Receives the 1929 Nobel
Prize for Physiology or Medicine.
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1907
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First successful human blood transfusion using
Landsteiner's ABO blood typing technique
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1913
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Dr. Paul Dudley White becomes one of America's first
cardiologists, a doctor specializing in the heart and its functions, and a
pioneer in use of the electrocardiograph, exploring its potential as a
diagnostic tool.
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1921
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Edward Mellanby discovers vitamin D and shows that its
absence causes rickets.
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1922
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Insulin first used to treat diabetes.
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1923
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First vaccine for diphtheria.
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1926
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First vaccine for pertussis (whooping cough).
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1927
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First vaccine for tuberculosis.
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1927
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First vaccine for tetanus.
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1928
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Scottish bacteriologist Sir Alexander Fleming discovers
penicillin. He shares the 1945 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with
Ernst Chain and Sir Howard Florey.
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1935
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First vaccine for yellow fever.
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1935
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Dr. John H. Gibbon, Jr. , successfully uses a heart-lung
machine for extracorporeal circulation of a cat (i.e., all the heart and lung
functions are handled by the machine while surgery is performed). Dr. Gibbon
uses this method successfully on a human in 1953. It is now commonly used in
open heart surgery.
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1937
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First vaccine for typhus.
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1937
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Bernard Fantus starts the first blood bank at Cook County
Hospital in Chicago, using a 2% solution of sodium citrate to preserve the
blood. Refrigerated blood lasts ten days.
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1943
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Microbiologist Selman A. Waksman discovers the antibiotic
streptomycin, later used in the treatment of tuberculosis and other diseases.
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1945
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First vaccine for influenza.
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1952
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Paul Zoll develops the first cardiac pacemaker to control
irregular heartbeat.
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1953
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James Watson and Francis Crick at Cambridge University
describe the structure of the DNA molecule. Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind
Franklin at King's College in London are also studying DNA. (Wilkins in fact
shares Franklin's data with Watson and Crick without her knowledge.) Watson,
Crick, and Wilkins share the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1962
(Franklin had died and the Nobel Prize only goes to living recipients).
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1954
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Dr. Joseph E. Murray performs the first kidney transplant
between identical twins.
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1955
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Jonas Salk develops the first polio.
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1957
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Dr. Willem Kolff and Dr. Tetsuzo Akutzu implant the first
artificial heart in a dog. The animal survives 90 minutes.
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1962
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First oral polio vaccine (as an alternative to the
injected vaccine).
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1964
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Firstvaccine for measles.
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1967
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First vaccine for mumps.
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1967
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South African heart surgeon Dr. Christiaan Barnard
performs the first human heart transplant.
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1970
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First vaccine for rubella.
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1974
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First vaccine for chicken pox.
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1977
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First vaccine for pneumonia.
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1978
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First test-tube baby is born in the U.K.
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1978
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First vaccine for meningitis.
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1980
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W.H.O. (World Health Organization) announces smallpox is
eradicated.
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1981
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First vaccine for hepatitis B.
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1982
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Dr. William DeVries implants the Jarvik-7 artificial heart
into patient Barney Clark. Clark lives 112 days.
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1983
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HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is identified.
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1992
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First vaccine for hepatitis A.
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1996
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Dolly the sheep becomes the first mammal cloned from an
adult cell (dies in 2003).
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1998
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First vaccine for lyme disease.
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2007
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Scientists discover how to use human skin cells to create
embryonic stem cells.
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